Aserto’s Product-Market Fit Journey: Beyond Problem-Solution Fit in Deep Tech

Technical founders often mistake solving a hard problem for achieving product-market fit. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Omri Gazitt shared how Aserto distinguishes between having a solution and having a market ready to buy it.

The Problem-Solution Trap

The authorization problem was clear to Omri from his days at Microsoft. “Authentication, authorization, we’re going to have to move to the cloud because there’s no operating system asked,” he explains. But recognizing a problem doesn’t automatically translate to market readiness.

Early Market Validation

Aserto’s initial validation came from studying how major tech companies handled authorization. “If you look at Google, they wrote a paper called Zanzibar Intuit, has a system called Oxy. Carta has one airbnb. Netflix. They all kind of wrote publicly about how they did things,” Omri notes. This research revealed common patterns—but also showed that companies were building solutions themselves.

The PMF Reality Check

Even with strong problem validation, Omri maintains a pragmatic view of product-market fit: “We have a lot of good early indications that the problem that we are solving resonates and resonates strongly. But for product market fit… you really want there to be strong pull from the market on your solution.”

Finding the Right Customers

Rather than targeting everyone with an authorization problem, Aserto identified specific segments where the pain was acute:

First: “B2B SaaS vendors that want to move from a coarse grained authentication model… to a fine grained authorization model.” These companies face immediate pressure from customers demanding more granular controls.

Second: “Enterprises that want to create a common authorization control plane for a number of their internal applications.” These organizations struggle with the “manning” problem of managing permissions across systems.

The Five Critical Questions

Omri distills their market validation framework into five essential questions:

1. “Who is the user?”
2. “Who’s the buyer?”
3. “Who are the people that are going to have the biggest pain?”
4. “How do you find those people?”
5. “How do you help them find you at the exact moment that they have the problem?”

Market Education vs Market Pull

One key insight: in deep tech, you often need to educate the market before you can measure true demand. “The blessing part of it is that more and more people now know that there is a solution that they can kind of bring in as opposed to have to build it all themselves,” Omri shares.

The Standards Milestone

Aserto sees industry standards as a crucial milestone in their PMF journey. “You don’t want to kind of go in too early because pre-standardizing things before you actually have some market pull is dangerous,” Omri explains. “But for this to really grow as a category… we’ll have to go create some standards and then compete within those standard frameworks.”

Looking Beyond Initial Traction

True product-market fit, in Aserto’s view, means reaching a point where “no one is confused about authorization as something that they have to go build on their own. In fact, they don’t want to because that means that their application is going to be a snowflake.”

For technical founders building deep tech products, Aserto’s journey offers crucial lessons. Having a technical solution isn’t enough—you need to identify specific customer segments, understand their buying patterns, and often educate the market before you can achieve true product-market fit. Sometimes the hardest part isn’t building the solution, but helping the market understand why they need it.